Mixed Race Studies

English prof. Diana Mafe pens literary analysis of biracial blacks

The Denisonian: Denison University’s student publication since 1857
Granville, Ohio
2013-11-19

Curtis Edmonds, Forum Editor

The United States is undoubtedly one of the most–if not the most–racially diverse country in the world, and seven percent of American children born in the last decade were bi- or multiracial. Denison English professor Diana Mafe, a Canada native, has a new book out that explores literary representations of biracial blacks in the United States and South Africa titled, “Mixed Race Stereotypes in South African and American Literature: Coloring outside the (Black and White) Lines.”

Mafe’s book, which was published earlier this month, is a 150-page examination of feminist and queer theory as it applies to the American “mulattos” and the South African “coloureds,” different terms for the same subject: biracial children who are the offspring of black and white parents.

The first 40 pages or so act as both a history lesson and introduction to the topic. She describes how mulattos and coloureds came to be – through consensual and nonconsensual sexual relationships between white men and black or African women as a result of colonialism and slavery…

…Today, the mulatto literary trope continues to be popular. Mafe asserts that this is because the “mulatto embodies infinite binaries.” And, she’s right. What better character type to navigate right and wrong, good and bad, black and white, than a character who literally falls in the middle?…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed Race Stereotypes in South African and American Literature: Coloring Outside the (Black and White) Lines

Palgrave Macmillan
November 2013
208 pages
3 illustrations
5.500 x 8.500 inches
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-137-36492-0, ISBN10: 1-137-36492-0

Diana Adesola Mafe, Assistant Professor of English
Denison University, Granville, Ohio

America’s new millennial interest in multiraciality coincides with South Africa’s post-apartheid push towards greater visibility as the Rainbow Nation. Here, Diana Adesola Mafe argues that the recent celebration of the mulatto as an avatar of positive change for multiracial nations like South Africa and the United States overlooks the complex global trajectories that resulted in this watershed moment. Mixed Race Stereotypes in South African and American Literature examines the popular literary stereotype, the tragic mulatto, from a comparative perspective. Mafe considers the ways in which specific South African and American writers have used this controversial literary character to challenge the logic of racial categorization. The result is a transnational dialogue between these respective national literatures, both of which use tragic mulatto fiction as a locus for broader questions about race and belonging.

Table of Contents

• Introduction: Tainted Blood: The ‘Tragic Mulatto’ Tradition
• 1. God’s Stepchildren: The ‘Tragedy of Being a Halfbreed’ in South African Literature
• 2. ‘An Unlovely Woman’: Bessie Head’s Mulatta (re)Vision
• 3. ‘A Little Yellow Bastard Boy’: Arthur Nortje’s Mulatto Manhood
• 4. Tragic to Magic?: Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit
• Conclusion: Playing in the Light

Caballeros and Indians: Mexican American Whiteness, Hegemonic Mestizaje, and Ambivalent Indigeneity in Proto-Chicana/o Autobiographical Discourse, 1858–2008

MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States
Volume 38, Issue 1 (March 2013)
pages 30-49
DOI: 10.1093/melus/mls010

B. V. Olguín, Associate Professor of English
University of Texas, San Antonio

In the spirit of a new people that is conscious not only of its proud historical heritage but also of the brutal gringo invasion of our territories, we, the Chicano inhabitants and civilizers of the northern land of Aztlán from whence came our forefathers, reclaiming the land of their birth and consecrating the determination of our people of the sun, declare that the call of our blood is our power, our responsibility, and our inevitable destiny.
—Alurista

I got up close with one of the enemy and after having pulled out lots of arrows he shot into me, I was able to fire a shot into his back, straight through from one side to the other. The Indian fell face down. Upon seeing this, Comelso Hernandez, who was close to me, ran towards the Indian saying “Now I’ll take away your fire!,” but since he was close, the Indian arose suddenly, fired an arrow shot hitting him below the Adam’s Apple, and going all the way through, the arrow stuck—the Indian, who perhaps had used his last bit of energy in this attack, fell dead, on his back—Hernandez, so terribly wounded as he was, dragged himself towards the corpse, took out a battle knife he carried and tried to stick it through his ribs, but it broke—Regardless, with the piece that remained he was able to make a big wound, and at the same time he was cutting towards the heart with his piece of knife, he said, as if the cadaver could hear: “I forgive you brother; I forgive you brother.”
—Juan Bernal (16-17)

The evening a diminutive twenty-two-year-old dark brown man with black hair and goatee read “El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán” at the National Chicano Liberation Youth Conference in Denver on March 30, 1969 (excerpted as  the first epigraph), Chicana/o indigeneity was transformed into a central trope in Chicana/o literature, historiography, and related social movements. The reader, Alberto Baltazar Urista Heredia—who took the penname Alurista—would become renowned for his Nahuatl glosses, white cotton frock, and calf-length pants characteristic of indigenous dress in southern Mexico. Such neo-indigenous performances became commonplace in the 1960s and 1970s cultural nationalist spectacles that punctuated the political mobilizations collectively known as the Chicano Movement. One half-century after Alurista’s performance and the subsequent reification of Chicana/o indigeneity in a multiplicity…

Read or purchase the article here.

3rd Annual: What Are You? – A Discussion about Mixed Heritage

Brooklyn Historical Society
Crossing Borders, Bridging Generations
Saturday, 2013-11-09, 14:00 EST (Local Time)

From the Travyon Martin murder trial, to racist responses to the Cheerios commercial starring an interracial couple, recent media events illustrate that the U.S is definitely not post-racial. Join BHS in exploring critical questions relating to multicultural and multiracial identity. We’ll discuss big questions like: How do we perform and display our identities? How does media, film, art, humor and photography shape and mediate mixed-race identity?

I will be introducing the panelists.

Panelists include:

• Michael David Murphy and Alyson West, creators of We are the 15%
• Chris Johnson of transmedia project, Question Bridge: Black Males
• Anoushka Ratnarajah and Marcelitte Failla of Toasted Marshmallows, and
• Jay Smooth, host of hip-hop video blog Ill Doctrine and video producer at Colorlines.com.

Plus a dance performance by special guests – We’re Muslim, Don’t Panic.

Co-sponsored by LovingDay.org, SWIRL, MAVIN: The Mixed Heritage Experience, and MixedRaceStudies.org.

Brooklyn Brewery beer and light refreshments will be served.

For more information, click here.

Trayvon, Postblackness, and the Postrace Dilemma

boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture
Volume 40, Number 3 (Fall 2013)
pages 139-161
DOI: 10.1215/01903659-2367072

Richard Purcell, Assistant Professor of English
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

If President Barack Obama crystallizes the intersection of postrace and postblack idealism, nothing has exposed the fraught relationship between the two than the shooting death of seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin on February 26, 2012. What Trayvon Martin’s death has brought to the fore is what contemporary intellectuals are attempting to think when they think postblackness and, for that matter, postrace. What way of understanding race knowledge in our present does postblackness offer us, especially in a postrace era? The answer: both blindness and insight. Through a meditation on the relationship between Trayvon Martin, postrace, and postblackness, this essay aims to demonstrate this blindness and insight. On the one hand, postblackness has the potential to provide a bulwark against the persistent biologisms in contemporary race thinking. Yet, it is also used in our postrace era as a term to indulge in a weaker mode of criticism: debunking—a critical posture that has allowed critics to ignore and even circulate more insidious forms of race thinking.

Read or purchase the article here.

Passing: When People Can’t Be Who They Are

PublicAffiars an imprint of Perseus Books Group
2004-11-30
288 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-58648-287-9
5 1/2 x 8 1/4

Brooke Kroeger, Professor of Journalism
New York University

Through the provocative stories of six contemporary “passers,” and examples from history and literature, a renowned journalist illuminates passing as a strategy for bypassing prejudice and injustice

Despite the many social changes of the last half-century, many Americans still “pass”: black for white, gay for straight, and now in many new ways as well. We tend to think of passing in negative terms—as deceitful, cowardly, a betrayal of one’s self. But this compassionate book reveals that many passers today are people of good heart and purpose whose decision to pass is an attempt to bypass injustice, and to be more truly themselves.

Passing tells the poignant, complicated life stories of a black man who passed as a white Jew; a white woman who passed for black; a working class Puerto Rican who passes for privileged; a gay, Conservative Jewish seminarian and a lesbian naval officer who passed for straight; and a respected poet who radically shifts persona to write about rock’n’roll. The stories, interwoven with others from history, literature, and contemporary life, explore the many forms passing still takes in our culture; the social realities which make it an option; and its logistical, emotional, and moral consequences. We learn that there are still too many institutions, environments, and social situations that force honorable people to twist their lives into painful, deceit-ridden contortions for reasons that do not hold.

Passing is an intellectually absorbing exploration of a phenomenon that has long intrigued scholars, inspired novelists, and made hits of movies like The Crying Game and Boys Don’t Cry.

Subjecting Pleasure: Claude McKay’s Narratives of Transracial Desire

Journal of Black Studies
Volume 44, Number 7 (October 2013)
pages 706-724
DOI: 10.1177/0021934713507579

Smita Das, 2012-2013 Dissertation Fellow
University of Illinois, Chicago

This article explores the threat posed by the Afro-Asian body in Claude McKay’s novels, Banjo (1929) and Banana Bottom (1933). Banjo’s narrative of transracial alliances converges onto the body of the Afro-Asian prostitute, whose positioning as a “conjunction” exposes contradictions surrounding immigration within French liberalism. Banana Bottom also maps a conflictual relationship between a licentious Afro-Asian coolie woman, and a Black subject who both wrestle with attaining national belonging within an idyllic Jamaica. While Banjo reveals McKay’s yearnings for transnational Black affiliations without the Afro-Asian woman, Banana Bottom reconciles the wrought relations between Black middle-class Jamaicans and the bastardized “coolie gal.”

Read or purchase the article here.

“A Future Unwritten”: Blackness between the Religious Invocations of Heidi Durrow and Zadie Smith

South Atlantic Quarterly
Volume 112, Number 4 (2013)
pages 657-674
DOI: 10.1215/00382876-2345225

Brian Bantum, Assistant Professor of Theology
Seattle Pacific University

Race and religion were two aspects of the Western colonial project. Novelists Heidi Durrow and Zadie Smith reflect two related but distinct articulations of how to understand this relationship from within the black diaspora and in particular the legacies of “mixed-race” children of the diaspora. This essay argues that each literary exploration of race and place demonstrates the inherent complications of two strategies of negotiating racial and religious identity in contemporary society. While Durrow seeks to extricate her character from both race and religion, seeing religion as simply a cultural marker, Smith wraps her main character inextricably to the historicity of race and religion. Through these interlocutors, this essay examines how black religion might imagine its future in relationship to the particularities of its diaspora(s) and confessions of faith.

Read or purchase the article here.

Critical Mixed Race Studies in the Twenty-First Century (ETHN 0090B S01)

Brown University
Fall 2013

Alexandrina R. Agloro, Visiting Instructor in American Studies

This course will guide students through an understanding of the historical, contemporary, and ideological rationale behind the constructions of mixed race, and how mixed race theory plays out in history, art, and contemporary media. This course aims to expand the conversations of mixed race beyond the stereotypes of tragic mulattos and happy hapas, instead interrogating what mixed race looks like in the twenty-first century and what historical precedents can explain current phenomena.

For more information, click here. View the syllabus (in Microsoft Word format) here.

The week of October 20th, my co-authored article with Glenn C. Robinson titled, “The Impact of Internet Publishing and Online Communications on Mixed-Race Discourses” from the Asian American Literary Review Special Issue on Mixed Race, will be part of the required reading. Please read the syllabus for information on some other additional excellent resources.

Review of Adult Supervision at Park Theatre Finsbury Park

LondonTheater1.com
London
2013-10-20

Alan Franks, Senior Reviewer

Adult supervision, if you remember, is what Barack Obama said Washington needed. This was back in 2006, two years before his election as forty-fourth president of the US, and the first black incumbent of the office. So there could hardly be a more timely moment than now for a play bearing his words as its title, with America once more squeezing through one of its congressional crises which baffle the world with their apparent childishness.

What’s more, Sarah Rutherford’s play is set on that giddy evening five years ago when the votes were counted, the unthinkable happened and a black American family prepared to move into the White House. So the joyful political liberation plays out as a running backdrop to the get-together of the four youngish women on whom we are here to eavesdrop. More a frontdrop actually, since the TV is situated on the fourth wall, which means they gawp and whoop at us as the results of the count come in. It is as if we are making our own fleeting guest appearances at the unfolding drama.

Our hostess is the controlling Natasha, lawyer turned full-time mother who loses no opportunity for trumpeting the moral virtue of her career shift. Her children are a statement in their own right; she is white and they are black, the fruits of an adoption mission to Ethiopia. One of her guests is the angry Mo, whose husband is black; another is Issy, Natasha’s supposed best friend; the third, and only black woman is the heavily pregnant Angela. In Natasha’s patronising, or matronising vision, the four of them are bonded by their commitment to mixed-race progeny…

Read the review here.